The Laws of
Game Theory

The Law of Selection

Why do migrant groups from the same country produce such different outcomes? Migration is a selection game before it is anything else. The outcome is largely fixed by the filter that decided who left — not by the culture of the country they left.

The mechanism

Nobody moves at random. Something selects who goes: a visa requiring capital or a degree, a war that displaces whoever is nearest the border, a labour agreement recruiting for one specific trade, a persecution that falls on one profession.

Each of those filters produces a different population, and the difference is enormous. A skilled-visa filter selects for education, savings and planning horizon. A displacement filter selects for proximity and urgency and nothing else.

So when two groups from the same country of origin produce different results in the same destination, the culture did not differ. The filter did. And because the filter operated before arrival, the destination's policies get credited or blamed for an outcome that was largely determined elsewhere.

The same reasoning applies to any move between arenas: who was admitted, and what did admission require?

A worked example

Take a single country of origin with two waves of departure a generation apart.

The first wave leaves under a scheme requiring professional qualifications and proof of funds. The second arrives as a displaced population with whatever they could carry.

Twenty years later the two groups show different incomes, different rates of business formation, different educational outcomes. The obvious explanation reaches for culture, or for how each was received.

The structural reading is simpler and checkable: compare the entry requirements. One filter selected for exactly the qualities that predict those outcomes; the other selected for being close to a border at the wrong moment. The destination changed nothing about who arrived.

What would prove this wrong

Groups entering through demonstrably different filters that nonetheless converge on identical outcomes within a generation, or groups entering through the same filter that diverge sharply without a change in conditions on arrival.

Where it comes from

Book One, chapter Game Theory #4: The Immigration Trap. The law is named in the second edition of that volume.

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Last reviewed 31 July 2026